Friday, February 6, 2009

The Brightest Flame Burns Quickest

Abstract:

The point of this project is to use gathered obituary data to show who has left the greatest mark. The list of data will be populated by Legacy.com and compared against result data from Google. Every person will be represented as a flame that can grow or burn out. The more flames grow the more they can absorb weaker flames to become a large fire. The effect will allow people to see who burns brightest.


Overview:

The first data part will be handled immediately by Legacy.com. This will give us an index of deaths to work off of and then Google will be able to give us our hits. The easiest way to put this application out to the public would be using action script 3.0 and Flash. Each full name will be assigned a point value of one and a space value of one. These values will be immediately brought up by one for every 100 results in a Google search. When the space value of the object gets to two it can now hold another flame inside of it that is one to two points below it. The flame however can only store smaller flames inside of it if there is a percentage of overlap in the search results. This will produce large fires containing people of similar interests or occupations. The user will then be able to mouse over the larger fires revealing the person with his keywords. The user can then click on the larger flame to access the smaller flames inside. For a more direction result name search functionality would be added. This should not only produce a visually interesting piece but show a varied set of relationships.


User Scenario:

Young Timmy Fiddlewinks always thought of his grandpa as the most famous man in the world. He just discovered the website for my devious invention and proceeds to enter his grandpa's name in the search. He not only finds out his grandpa is grouped in the same flame as Adolf Hitler but a lot of other leading Nazis. Timmy is obviously distraught by the whole situation and his body is later discovered in the river. Timmy is later grouped in Sid Vicious' flame. This is a rather depressing user scenario in retrospect.



Sources:

Flowing data

Movements

Burst Labs


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